How to create an online resume

My post on creating a Java developer resume (which you can read here) has proven to be one of the sites most popular. I’ve been even more impressed by the number of people following through to the links regarding online resumes. This is clearly something are interested in, as they should be. The vast majority of firms do online research on candidates now, and a lack of online presence can be a warning sign. On the positive side, including a link to your online resume on your paper CV can ensure that people always see the latest version of your CV, and you can use this to direct them to your other sites online. It’s also much easier to bookmark a candidate for later than to file the CV away where it will inevitably get lost.

As a result I wanted to put together this step by step tutorial to getting your online CV up. It’s often difficult to know where to start which means people are paralysed into inaction. Below lays out everything you need to do to get your CV online in under 10 minutes. You have 10 minutes right?

I have created the videos to guide you through, but the full instructions are listed below too.

Part One: Buying your domain

You need a domain to point people at which has your CV. Fortunately this is really easy to do. If you can get yourname.com then that’s perfect, but if not there’s some other great domain endings geeks use, particularly .me and .io. For this example I went for samatkinson.me.

You need to buy your domain and hosting from somewhere. There are tons of options at various price points out there. I use A Small Orange for every single one of my sites. They’re consistently rated as one of the best providers in online polls (such as this lifehacker one). The big thing for me is the support; if I have any issues, from breaking one of my code templates to having issues setting something up they have 24/7 chat support with no waiting times. I can’t recommend it enough. There are other hosting providers available though and it’s completely your choice.

Enter the domain that you’re looking for; for me that was samatkinson.me. This will search for that domain and similar domains.

If your domain is available then select it, else play around with other options. If you’re really struggling, pop your name into Domainr which will help you come up with some innovative domain ideas.

On the next screen you can just pass straight through. We’re leaving the nameservers pointing at ASO as we will buy our hosting from them too. ID Protection will hide your details on places like whois. It’s expensive but for the privacy conscious it’s a good idea.

This will take you through to your cart. But we’re not done just yet, as we need to add hosting. A website has to be hosted on a server somewhere. Fortunately this is very cheap! Click on “Add another product” on the right.

This will take you to the hosting options. For an online CV you only need a very small amount of space so the “tiny” option will be sufficient. If you select small or above you will be able to use multiple domains with the same hosting which can be quite cost efficient.

On the next screen we want this hosting to be used with our domain, so we can just click next.

Skip straight pass the next two screens unless you want one of the add ons. I never select these.

And now you’re done! Checkout with your details and make sure to write down your login details.

Bonus! Get 15% off at the checkout using coupon code “aE1yQ”

Part 2: Uploading your template

The obvious question at this point is “What template?”. You have three options

Write it yourself: Not recommended! It’s a lot of effort and, based on some I’ve seen in the past, it probably won’t look great.

Use the CJIQ template: As a bonus for every reader of Java Interview Bootcamp they receive an exclusive resume template. This too is based on bootstrap. This is what I used in the tutorial and video, but the instructions are EXACTLY the same as the free template above.

From the ASO homepage, select “Support and Account Center” from the top right and login.

On the next screen you will see “Your Services”. This is your hosting which we need to log into. Select it, then “View Details”.

If you don’t know your cPanel login then you can select “Change Password” to set a new one. Else, head straight to “Login to cPanel”. This will take us to our control panel where we can get the details for uploading our resume.

Enter your login details which will take you to the cPanel. There is a ton of stuff here we can ignore. We want FTP. FTP is file transfer protocol, which allows us to upload files to our hosting. In the “find functions” box, type “FTP”.

Select FTP Accounts. On the accounts page scroll down to the “FTP Accounts” header. You will find your FTP account here. Click “Configure FTP client”. This will give us the configuration to allow us to upload our template.

You will now be presented with configuration files for a number of FTP clients. An FTP client is a piece of software you can download which will handle file upload. I’m a huge fan of Cyberduck, which is available for Windows and Mac and is completely free. You can download it from https://cyberduck.io/. Once you’ve done that, download the Cyberduck configuration and doubleclick the file that is downloaded.

Cyberduck will now open. Enter the login details for your FTP account; the address you selected from the FTP accounts list (e.g.something@yourdomain.com) and the password (which you can change on the FTP accounts page).

Make sure the username includes the FULL account, not just the bit before the @symbol.

Once you’re logged in you’ll be shown everything that’s in your domain. This is normally just a cgi-bin folder. We can now upload anything to our domain by dragging and dropping it in.

Unzip your resume template which you have downloaded. We want index.html to be in the space cyberduck is showing you. Go inside the folder your index.html sits in and select everything (cmd+a or ctrl+a for windows). Drag and drop the files into cyberduck.

The files will upload to the server. When it’s complete, your website will be live! Congratulations!

Share this:

3 Comments

[…] I’ve created a free step-by-step tutorial on creating your online CV, from buying the domain through to uploading your free template. You can access it from www.corejavainterviewquestions.com/create-online-resume/. […]